User Centric Design with Big Data

politics

The Tea Party, Occupy Wallstreet and many other movements (that are not about human rights) share the same problems. In order to gain a big following they have to have very, very simple ideas at their core. Charles Stross wrote a nice blog post about a totally different topic but I am going to shamelessly quote out of context.

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.Stross: insufficient data

Governing gets harder as the world gets more complex because our ability and desire to understand complexity is not growing exponentially.

The political response of republicans and democrats has been pretty much the same. All of the presidential candidates pays lip service to the notion of personal responsibility, but at the end of the day they all propose allowing people to remain in homes that they could never have reasonably afforded.

This is classic moral hazard. Rewarding people for taking crazy risks is bad policy. Rather than saving my money for a down-payment and living within my means, I should have gotten an interest-only loan for a house that I could only afford on the teaser rate. Then I would get 5 years of subsidized interest rates in this bail-out.

Irrational bubbles like this are painful and they should be. I do not know of any investors who got bailed out after the dot.com bust. They took a risk and lost.

So whoever gets elected in 2008, they will be on the wrong side of this important issue.